Asylum Hill Has A Chance To Reclaim Park

I walked through Sigourney Square Park in Asylum Hill on Monday, and the place was a pigpen. It was so full of garbage and broken glass that someone could have been using it for a dump.

There were only two kids playing in the park. There should have been hundreds, because it's the only bit of open space in the neighborhood. The spray pool was broken. Some winos were drinking out of paper bags.

FOR THE RECORD - The name of Joanne Bonsey, an Asylum Hill resident, was misspelled in Tom Condon's column on the onnecticut Page Thursday.

I went back Tuesday. What a difference. I'm told men from a nearby halfway house picked up the garbage. A city crew was fixing the spray pool. Dozens of kids, from the parks department's summer lunch program, played and ate sandwiches. There were fewer balkies.

Keep an eye on the park. If Asylum Hill residents can reclaim it, if it stays as it was on Tuesday, their whole neighborhood will be safer and more livable. This is the best chance they've had in years.

Eighteen officers from the police department's Compass drug-interdiction program have been in the Hill for the past six months. They've busted hundreds of dealers. Drug activity is way down.

Drug-related crime is also down. The Compass cops made thousands of street stops, stopping suspicious characters in cars. Street stops work. They keep punks out of a neighborhood, for one reason. The cops are very creative at finding guns in cars, and the punks don't like to lose their guns.

It's a shame the city can't keep Compass going indefinitely, but it can't. Most of the program is over. The challenge for the neighborhood is to avoid backsliding.

To do this, community organizers are planning to form a giant block-watch group, using residents and the security guards at neighborhood institutions such as St. Francis Hospital, Aetna and CML Alliance. They'll be linked by two-way radios issued by the police, and will work with the police.

Winning back Sigourney Square Park will be a challenge, in part because of a drugstore across the street that sells most of its

drugs in liquid form. Pierce Pharmacy, at the corner of Sigourney and Ashley streets, does a big business in small bottles of booze.

For years, residents have been used to seeing balkies sitting in front of the pharmacy, or across the street in the park, drinking, harassing women who pass by and breaking the bottles in the park -- often in the wading pool, making it unusable for kids. The park has also been used by drug dealers and addicts, so many parents have kept their children away.

The Compass cops swept a bunch of the trouble-making imbibers off the street, and the courts have steered them toward community-service projects.

Residents say there've been fewer troublemakers around in recent weeks than there've been in a long time. There's only one way to keep it that way.

"We, the residents, have to do it," said Joanne Bondi of Woodland Drive, and she's absolutely correct.

"There's too much litter because parents aren't teaching the kids not to litter. Residents have to clean the park, beautify the park, plant flowers, take pride in the park. The only way we'll have pride is if we do it ourselves. If good people fill the park, the bad people won't go there," said Bondi, a parent who works at Aetna.

In the next couple of weeks, organizers such as Chip Geer of Asylum Hill Inc., and people from the Citizens Committee of New York City, a group that helps neighbors reclaim their streets, will go door to door, recruiting Asylum Hill residents to help. As Bondi says, they are the ones who have to do it